sible, illustrations from your own observation. A robin
was noticed feeding one of its young, which sat on a limb with its
mouth open, crying for more, except when it was stopped with food. The
parent came with her beak filled with worms twenty-seven times in less
than as many minutes, and then left her child seemingly as hungry as
ever, for he complained and hopped along the limb, keeping a sharp
lookout for several minutes. That chick must have been as full of
worms as a fisherman's bait-box. Picture the condition of our lawns,
gardens, and groves if all the birds were suddenly banished and the
insects held full sway. In this connection, the writer should study
and make quotations or abstracts from "The Birds of Killingworth," by
Longfellow.

In a recent lecture, Prof. Witmer Stone, of Philadelphia, cited many
facts to show that birds are nature's great check on the excess of
insects, and that they keep the balance between plants and insect
life. Ten thousand caterpillars, it has been estimated, could destroy
every blade of grass on an acre of cultivated ground. In thirty days
from the time it is hatched an ordinary caterpillar increases 10,000
times in bulk, and the food it lives and grows on is vegetable. The
insect population of a single cherry tree infested with aphides was
calculated by a prominent entomologist at no less than twelve million.
The bird population of cultivated country districts has been estimated
at from seven hundred to one thousand per square mile. This is small
compared with the number of insects, yet as each bird consumes
hundreds of insects every day, the latter are prevented from becoming
the scourge they would be but for their feathered enemies.

Mr. E. H. Forbush, Ornithologist of the Board of Agriculture of
Massachusetts, states that the stomachs of four chickadees contained
1,028 eggs of the cankerworm. The stomachs of four other birds of the
same species contained about 600 eggs and 105 female moths of the
cankerworm. The average number of eggs found in twenty of these moths
was 185; and as it is estimated that a chickadee may eat thirty female
cankerworm moths per day during the twenty-five days which these moths
crawl up trees, it follows that in this period each chickadee would
destroy 138,750 eggs of this noxious insect.

A pamphlet issued by the Department of Agriculture of the United
States says that the cuckoo, which is common in all the Eastern
States, has been conclusively s